“Captain Alexis Larkin of the Thirty Dozen,” I said. “She’s a friend of mine.”
She nodded; then I saw her nod at Debbie, who was shuddering and weeping silently, staring through one of the smashed portholes. My gaze followed hers, and only then did I realize that my father had already scrambled out of the capsule and was now outside, cradling Graham’s dead body, with his helmet’s clear faceplate pressed to his friend’s cracked and bloodied one.
His comm was muted, but through his fogging faceplate, I could see his face contorted in anguish. His mouth was open in a silent wail as he hugged Graham, rocking his lifeless form back and forth. Back and forth.
That was the only time I ever saw my father cry.
I don’t know how many seconds passed like that. I do know that I was still trying to muster the courage to yell at my father, and tell him we had to get moving, when he finally stood up and scrambled back inside the capsule. Then he hit a button on the bulkhead. Armored shutters irised closed over the capsule’s smashed portholes, sealing the leaks in the hull. As the cabin repressurized, my father got us moving forward again.
Debbie was still weeping silently in her seat. Whoadie put an arm around her.
“ ‘Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,’ ” the young woman recited. “ ‘And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.’ ”
Debbie nodded and took a deep breath. Then, in what seemed like the space of a few seconds, I saw her expression transformed from grief into pure, unbridled rage.
Our escape capsule reached the opposite end of the darkened tunnel a few minutes later, and we pulled into a pressurized arrival dock, and the capsule’s doors hissed open. We followed my father to the armored doors of what was clearly an emergency bunker the EDA had constructed in the Icarus crater.
I saw my father hold his breath when he placed his palm against the scanner beside the station’s armored front entrance. The faceplate beeped and turned green a second later, and the doors to the Icarus bunker slid open, revealing a narrow tunnel beyond. My father ushered us all inside, then punched a button on the wall. The armored doors slammed shut behind us, sealing us safely inside. We found ourselves in a small hangar bay nestled at the Icarus crater’s base. Inside it, eight Interceptors stood gleaming under the halogen floodlights.
“We have to hurry,” my father said. “Everyone take a ship. Quickly now!”
I hurried down the catwalk to examine the nearest one. These ships weren’t like any of the drone Interceptors we’d already seen: They had cockpits, and were designed to be piloted from inside, rather than remotely. “These are ADI-89s,” my father shouted to us. “Special manned Interceptor prototypes.”
As he spoke, he was reaching into a large metal tool chest bolted to the wall of the hangar. He took out some sort of pistol-shaped power tool, like a motorized ratchet, then ran over to the first Interceptor and opened a hatch on the underside of its hull, revealing a mess of wires and circuitry. As he dug around inside, he said, “We didn’t have access to this bunker until the invasion began, to prevent us from using them to go AWOL.” He smiled. “But the base security protocol fail-safes just granted me emergency access.”
He used the power tool to remove a small cube-shaped component from the ship’s underbelly, tossed it on the floor, and closed up the hatch. Then he ran over to the next Interceptor and repeated the process.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
“Don’t you think I know that?” he said. “This is important. Sixty more seconds.”
True to his word, a minute later he had pulled the same cube-shaped component out of all eight ships. I picked one of them up off the floor to examine it. Stenciled on the side of its gray plastic casing was a long serial number followed by some letters: eda-ai89-ava-trnspnder.
His task complete, my father ran up the metal gantry platform and over to a darkened command console that lit up at his touch. The fingers of both his hands began to dance across its touchscreens as he tapped icons and navigated submenus—almost as fast as Commander Data. In seconds, he had powered up all eight of the AI-89s. Their fusion engines began to hum and then whine, their exhaust ports glowing with orange energy.